Rozelle

  Rozelle had always thrived. He knew that if he failed, the entire

  merger would have collapsed and the two leagues as they were

  then structured would have lost a number of franchises and the

  ultimate preeminent position the nfl holds today.

  The deal was simple. They would pass it in the Senate and

  then attach it as a rider to a tax investment bill and use the

  Democratic- controlled Ways and Means Committee to get it

  done. The battle would give the term Mississippi riverboat gam-

  bler a brand- new meaning. The 100- yard New Orleans poker

  game was under way.

  “I invited Rozelle to my apartment at the Watergate and showed

  him how it could be easy because the Johnson administration

  wanted that tax bill,” Senator Long told the New Orleans Times-

  Picayune years later. “I told him we had to have the New Orleans franchise in return.”

  “I spent quite a lot of time with Russell Long,” Rozelle told me

  later in all candor. “I remember one night we sat up drinking in

  his apartment until 3:00 a.m., and he was fascinating. He told me

  fabulous stories about his uncle Huey and his father, Earl. Yes,

  although I hadn’t consulted with my owners, I did vaguely make

  the New Orleans commitment that night. I remember I said, ‘Well,

  I’m sure you know that we are eventually going to expand. Where

  the hell do you think we are going to go? Fort Wayne?’”

  To hedge that bet, Rozelle made three appearances before Cel-

  ler’s House committee. The congressman told Rozelle that he

  would endorse a merger bill if it covered only the merger and noth-

  ing else and if he would publicly agree that the player draft, the

  awarding of new franchises, and pay television would be totally

  outside of that antitrust exemption.

  Some chance. Would Attila the Hun turn in his sword? Would

  Henry Ford recruit somebody to organize a union? Rozelle respect-

  fully declined.

  “They are simply poor negotiators,” Celler told the public that

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  Bringing in the Sheaves

  day. “They are asking the House to rescue them from their own ineptitudes and follies.”

  Dixon sent Klack back up to Washington for a third time on

  the day of the Senate vote, which came first. This is what Dixon

  told me happened that day, according to Klack, adding:

  I believe it word for word. I was paying David, and he had no reason

  to lie to me. David said:

  “I was walking the rotunda with Hale and Pete on the way to the

  vote, and Pete said, ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this, Hale,’

  and Hale said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know how to thank

  me? We have a deal . . . We do have a deal, don’t we, for the New

  Orleans franchise?’

  “And Pete said he would give it his best effort, and Hale told him,

  ‘Well, you better go back right now and find out whether you can

  or you can’t deliver because until you do, there’s no vote. The vote

  is officially off,’ and he started walking away. He did not look back.”

  Dixon said next that “Klack told me Pete actually ran after him,

  and Hale wasn’t lollygagging. He was moving pretty good when

  Pete finally caught up with him and said, ‘Hale, you have it. I’m

  sure you have it.’”

  Their dialogue was Rozelle’s final deal in the World Champi-

  onship of Liars Poker. Later Pete would tell me that not a single

  club owner knew about the deal. “I just did what I had to do,” he

  said. Obviously, it was neither the first nor the last time.

  The bill that left the Senate for the House involved taxes, and

  now appended to it as a rider was the nfl- afl antitrust merger

  exemption. Long knew that the Johnson administration desper-

  ately wanted the tax bill passed. He was ready for Celler.

  Now it was up to Boggs, who immediately enlisted fellow Dem-

  ocrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means

  Committee, and made it a matter of party loyalty at a time when

  Boggs’s seat was in danger in the upcoming election. Together

  they orchestrated what followed.

  It began when Celler demanded the House delete the rider and

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  147

  pass the tax bill without it. At that point Representative Jackson E.

  Betts (r- oh) called for a motion that would have killed the entire

  bill. By a vote of 184– 57 (few Democrats would risk the wrath of

  Lyndon Johnson), the motion was defeated. The bill and the rider

  then passed 161– 76 over the protests of a badly shaken Celler.

  After Johnson signed the bill, Celler raged to his colleagues: “I

  have lost the game but not the series. I am going to continue this

  inquiry, and I am sure that a great deal will become manifest that

  if you knew now you wouldn’t have voted to pass it.”

  The lone House voice in Celler’s defense came from Repre-

  sentative William Cahill, who said that Celler had “not been

  beaten by an end run. He had been clipped from behind and the

  House subjected to unnecessary roughness; the commissioner

  should be penalized half the distance to the goal and the game

  postponed until next year.” He did not add that the brothers had

  lost the chance to finally win one for the Gipper, but with cli-

  chés like that, it is no wonder Cahill went on to become gover-

  nor of New Jersey.

  Rozelle had made a powerful enemy in Congress, but in typi-

  cal fashion he immediately set about trying to repair the damage

  with a man who would surely have him back again as a witness.

  He sent him a personal handwritten note, explaining that he had

  indeed made an end run around the congressman, but he hoped

  he would understand. He cited the enormous pressure generated

  by the American public that had left him no choice. It is inter-

  esting to note that a few days later, Representative Celler showed

  Rozelle’s letter to fellow committee members without rancor.

  On November 1, 1966, Commissioner Pete Rozelle arrived in

  New Orleans to announce the formation of the New Orleans nfl

  franchise. Actually, it was set a few weeks earlier, but the public

  relations man in Pete Rozelle’s soul could not pass up this kind of

  opportunity. He had delayed the announcement until this date,

  which was celebrated on the New Orleans calendar as All Saints’

  Day. The team, of course, would be named the Saints.

  Now only two hurdles remained for Pete Rozelle to clear before

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  Bringing in the Sheaves

  the end of this 100- yard junior- varsity Armageddon. There had to be a championship game, and there had to be a sorting out of

  twenty- six franchises into two one- world conferences.

  While all of America’s football public viewed the title game as

  the real showdown, who would eventually play where each year

  presented major problems that nobody had even considered. The

  first telephone call the switchboard operator at the nfl office took

  the morning after the war ended came from Denver:

  “I want two hundred seats right now for the championship game.”

  “Well, sir, we don
’t know who will be in it, where it will be

  played, or how much tickets cost.”

  “I didn’t ask you any of that. I just want to buy two hundred

  seats.”

  The telephones never stopped that day. But in all that jingle-

  jangle, there were only two bells Rozelle was waiting to hear. One

  would come from cbs, and the other would come from nbc. He

  did not have to wait long. But they did.

  Between them Bill MacPhail of cbs (the old guard’s network

  of record) and Carl Lindemann of nbc (the afl network) would

  spend enough on calls to the commissioner to pay Uganda’s phone

  bill for a year. This would be the ultimate prize in their network

  careers, and they knew it. Which one would get Rozelle’s blessing?

  cbs had been the nfl house outlet from the moment Rozelle

  negotiated the single- network deal for his teams in 1961. MacPhail

  would argue that cbs had spent millions for the nfl schedule and

  its title game . . . a game that had now been reduced to the sta-

  tus of a semifinal match. nbc had been shellacked in the ratings

  2– 1 that season, but if money could be the factor, it would spend

  it. It would come to these negotiations prepared to fight all the

  way down to the last Ivy League vest in its sales department. And

  Rozelle ignored both of them.

  “What are you going to do about this?” I asked him.

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure,” but I knew he was.

  “How long before you decide?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” but I knew he was.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  149

  He had learned an awful lot about tv negotiations from two of his owners, Art Modell, the former ad exec who knew the business inside out, and Sonny Werblin, the old mca king who just

  about invented it.

  Rozelle had already rejected Ralph Wilson’s suggestion that

  maybe they should go pay- per- view in the theaters where they

  could make possibly even more money. “As long as I am commis-

  sioner,” he told me and others, “we will never, ever charge televi-

  sion viewers for a title game.”

  Rozelle let both networks stew until July. Then the talks

  began. They talked. He listened. They argued. He listened. They

  demanded. He lit up another cigarette and suggested they meet

  again. July melted into August. August dissolved into September.

  One thing, however, remained chiseled in stone. There would

  indeed be a championship game involving the two league cham-

  pions. It had been written into the legalese they had agreed upon

  in accepting the merger. The nfl insisted. The afl insisted. But

  most of all Pete Rozelle sensed that before too many renewals,

  America would learn to love the weeks leading up to determining

  the last two teams standing.

  The game would happen. But who would televise it? Rozelle

  was patient because he knew the Madison Avenue suits had to

  come to him.

  And so it was that one day with absolutely no warning, he handed

  them the formula he had wanted all along. Both networks would

  carry the game in a simulcast, and each would pay $1 million. As

  a sop to MacPhail, cbs cameras would be responsible for the video,

  but nbc would have its own director pick and choose the pictures it

  would show. In phase two cbs would have two Super Bowls sand-

  wiched around one for nbc. For phase two, each would pay $2.5

  million per game.

  It was Werblin who had come up with the simulcast idea. But

  even he did not understand that in so doing, the newly merged

  nfl had created a second drama that gripped America with unex-

  pected interest.

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  Bringing in the Sheaves

  cbs would throw its vast resources into the video buildup to attract viewers a month before the game. It planned to cash in on

  the enormous name recognition of its announcers and the pop-

  ulation of its nfl cities. Its hype included announcements punc-

  tuated by kettle drum and staccato voice- overs. You could almost

  close your eyes and expect to hear the unseen announcer say as

  the drumbeats grew louder, “Patton crosses the Rhine.”

  nbc, with really only two nationally known tv faces of the afl,

  Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman, opted to eschew the ruffles,

  flourishes, and cannon’s roar and go for erudition. Their tack here

  was the two best who would give you insight instead of bombast.

  So the video battle lines were drawn. It would be cbs versus

  nbc, the Ford Motor Company (the nfl’s prime sponsor) versus

  Chrysler (their afl counterpart), Jack Whitaker, Frank Gifford,

  and Pat Summerall (the cbs primary announcers) versus Gowdy,

  Christman, and Charlie Jones. Together the rival networks would

  give Rozelle the greatest hype in the history of sports. With this

  in mind and the expected huge media group anticipated to work

  both camps the week before the game, Rozelle’s next order of busi-

  ness dealt with the volatile psyche of Vince Lombardi.

  Approaching any game, Vincent generally had all the restraint

  of a falling safe. Competition of any kind was his emotional heart-

  beat. I remember his wife, Marie, telling me of a day he played

  marbles with his young grandson in the Lombardi living room.

  When the kid began to cry and Marie asked him why, he said,

  “Grandpa is winning all my marbles.”

  “Jesus, Vince,” she whispered, “he’s only a baby. Let him win

  once.”

  “Mind your business, Marie,” he said.

  Obviously, he did not need to be reminded of the pressure of

  this particular football game.

  But he was— constantly. Wellington Mara, his former Fordham

  classmate, had written him a letter in which he said how important

  this game was to them and voiced his belief that “I would want no

  other general to carry the nfl flag into battle for us.”

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  151

  “I understood his feeling,” Vince later told me, “but that letter made me even more uncomfortable.”

  The game would be in Los Angeles. The Chiefs would train in

  nearby Long Beach, and Lombardi wanted no distractions (transla-

  tion: as few media interviews of the Packers as possible). He planned

  to train at a place called Ricky’s in Palo Alto, 111 miles away.

  If that plan held, writers attempting to cover both teams would

  log more miles in a week than Vasco de Gama did in a year. Told

  of Vince’s intention by Jim Kensil, Rozelle said just seven words:

  “He is not going to Palo Alto.”

  Then he picked up the telephone, called Green Bay, and told

  Vince: “You are not going to Palo Alto.”

  After each of Vincent’s arguments as to why he was, Rozelle

  repeated those same seven words, and when the conversation ended

  he said them again, which is how and why the Packers set up camp

  in Santa Barbara.

  While the Packers and the Chiefs worked that week, the nfl

  staff with three new additions from the afl office— Herskowitz,

  Pinchbeck, and Kaze— were following Rozelle’s detailed instruc-

  tions as to how to run something nobody had ever tried to run

&
nbsp; before. The group included the usual suspects: Kensil, the second

  in command; Weiss, who did a little of everything; Granholm, the

  onetime king of the Rams’ locker room; and Duncan, now super-

  visor of officials. It was these last two who brought George Toma

  from Kansas City out to the Coliseum to take a chicken- shit turf

  and turned it into chicken salad. Toma was the Rembrandt of all

  groundskeepers and worked decades of Super Bowls.

  “This is how well organized Pete was,” Herskowitz will tell

  you. “Nobody had ever run a Super Bowl. None of us had any idea

  what a Super Bowl was. But Pete wanted to be ready. He actually

  sent me a twenty- two- page note of things he wanted us to do as

  soon as we got there.”

  The Super Bowl may have excited America’s army of football

  fans, but Seymour Siwoff, the league’s head statistician, ran into

  the one place that wasn’t even mildly excited. He told me:

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  Bringing in the Sheaves

  In no time we were out of everything— paper . . . staples . . . rubber bands— and Thelma Elkjer, Pete’s executive secretary, told me

  to find a stationery store and get as much as I could of everything.

  I gave this guy a humongous order, and then I showed him my nfl

  id and explained that Super Bowl headquarters was just around the

  block at the Statler- Hilton, and he told me, “Marvelous. I hope you

  like your room. But I don’t know anyone associated with you, and

  you ain’t gettin’ no credit here.”

  I had to use my own personal credit card.

  We were all so wrapped up in trying to please Pete by making it

  perfect. I don’t think Duncan ever went to bed. He was so punchy

  from sleep deprivation that one day he said, “Seymour, this is almost

  as big as a championship game.” And I said, “Mark, this is the cham-

  pionship game.”

  The game did not sell out— the only Super bowl that did not.

  But historians forget that the Coliseum had eighty- five thousand

  seats, and when sixty- five thousand or so attended the huge sec-

  tions of empties gave a misleading impression.

  Years later, recalling that day, Rozelle told me:

  I can still recall the way I felt. What I never said before was that I was still very much a football fan, and I was really curious to see how well the hype would hold up. I was anxious to see what the new kids on